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Friday Night Murders

“Each one of us got threatening calls from a stranger. He has been warning us that he will kill us. He claims that we have killed his brother when we went on vacation a few months ago during the summer. But, we did not kill his brother. He was completely all right until the day we left the vacation resort. He was a helping boy and he was a nice boy,” explained Harish to the investigation cop.

“Isn’t this directly taken from the plot of ‘I know what you did last summer’?” asked the cop, Chetan, sarcastically.

“It all seems to be so. But, a couple of us recorded the call that we received. And, we also have proofs to say that we did not harm the boy in any way. We have pictures that show that he is very much alive while we were there, ” told Harish.

Chetan listened to the recorded telephone conversations. He tried to think more and asked them the details of the vacation resort that they visited.

This would have been just a simple blackmail case if not for the death of two of the people from the group that visited the vacation resort in the summer. The cops had two tasks at hand – prevent the death of the other members and find out the real culprit.

Chetan and his team visited the vacation resort and came to know from the hotel management that the boy, Chinnappa, went missing from the same month these people went on vacation. None of them have any clue of the boy after the summer. They did not even know that he was killed. Chetan also tried to find out about the elder brother who is seeking revenge on the college kids. Nobody knows about the family of this boy. There is no ample information in their records. All they know is that he is from a different state and he came to this hill station a couple of years seeking livelihood.

Chetan and his team visited the village of the boy. They could not find any information about the boy or his family there. It was apparent that the boy gave wrong information when he got a job in the hotel. Most of these hotels are not used to conducting background checks for all the boys who get employed there.

So, Chetan and his team reached a dead end in their investigation.

Chetan returned to the college students and started interrogating each of them and did some background check of all the fifteen people who went on vacation then. To get more information, Chetan investigated some of their friends and parents, too. But, they did not get any information.

According to the pattern established by the murderer, the two people got killed on a Friday night at their respective places. So, Chetan decided to provide security to the remaining people on Friday night. And, the strange caller followed his call schedule for killing too. The first person to get a call from the stranger got killed first. So, this gave them ample information about who the next target could be.

Nimisha was terrified. She realized that it was her time to get killed. Though there was security all around her house and her parents flew all the way from Mumbai to be with her, did not seem to help. She was afraid.

Chetan was pretty confident that any intruder into the campus of Nimisha’s house would be caught. He thought that the criminal cannot escape them. He arranged for people and CCTV cameras across the campus and within the house.

The next morning, Chetan got a call. It was the cops stationed outside Nimisha’s house. One of them said, “Sorry to share some bad news. There has been on intruder the whole of last night. But, Nimisha is dead. Her parents woke up beside her to see her lifeless. We are waiting for the doctors to rush in here.”

Chetan was startled. He asked, “How did you let this happen? Did you check the CCTV footage?”

The cop replied, “Yes. We did. There was no one suspicious activity in the footage.”

Chetan said, “That is impossible. Did you find any anomaly at all?”

The other cop said, “There was a power cut for nearly thirty minutes at 2 in the night. But, we were all alert and got the generator up and running within five minutes. We talked to Nimisha. She said that she was fine, then.”

Chetan and his team were left clueless. They spent one more week going through all the details of the night. They did not get any idea. Chetan went to the extent of doing background checks of the cops who were stationed outside the house. He investigated the servants and everyone related to the house, in any remote manner.”

The only surprising thing in the entire equation is that the post mortem reports claimed that Nimisha was strangled to death.

Chetan was not sure how this happened when she was with her parents and when there cops around the house.

So, after one week, it was the turn of Yogesh to get killed according to the schedule of the murdered. Chetan decided to patrol the house of Yogesh with his team the whole night and take care of Yogesh. He decided to be with Yogesh in his room as much as possible.

Finally, the Friday came. Chetan went to stay with Yogesh that night. Nothing untoward happen. It started raining after 1 and there was a power cut at two. Chetan has already planned this and made sure there was an invertor to restore power immediately. Everything seemed normal even after the power got restored at around three.

Yogesh slept on the cot beside his elder brother. Chetan asked Yogesh’s elder brother to keep checking on Yogesh after every half an hour. At around three thirty, Yogesh’s elder brother shouted suddenly. He let Chetan know that Yogesh died. His heart was not beating. There was no pulse. Chetan was bewildered. He was in the same room. Nobody could enter from outside. The CCTV camera footage did not help either.

Chetan got instructions from his superiors saying that he should deal with the case seriously. There have been four murders already. They cannot let innocent people die like this.

Though he was terribly confused, he was confident that he will solve the problem the next week at the stipulated time when the next murder is supposed to take place. It was the turn of the student who complained in the first place – Harish.

Chetan decided to save Harish at any cost.

Friday night came. There was a power cut at 2 am. Harish was fine. Exactly at 3 am, Chetan had a big fight with Harish’s best friend, Nikhil, who was also in the same room. Chetan stopped Nikhil when he was trying to strangle Harish to death.

The next morning, Chetan, explained the case to all the students. He did not get Nikhil arrested for trying to kill his friend.

Chetan called all the students who went on vacation. He said, “We have a well-orchestrated and complicated case in our hand. There is a cold-blooded murderer who is using multiple techniques to kill the victims. He is not doing the crime himself. He is using hypnosis. On Thursday, just a day before Harish was about to be killed, Nikhil met some stranger at the shopping mall and had a talk with him for half an hour. Our cops could not listen to the conversation, but realized that this was not normal. The guy who talked to Nikhil hypnotized him. The same thing happened to Nimisha’s father and Yogesh’s brother. They were all hypnotized by this murderer. According to their plan, there would be a power cut. Once power is restored, Nikhil would spray the room silently with a chemical he got from the criminal. This would make others in the room, including the victim, intoxicated for at least thirty minutes. When the victim is in a deep sleep state, Nihil or the agent would fiddle with the CCTV footage and then would strangle Harish. I stepped in at the right moment and stopped this from happening. I realized that something like this would happen. So, I took medicines last night that prevent me from falling asleep even for a few minutes in the presence of the most intoxicating smells. And, I used a filter to my nose that helped me. I also included an app in my mobile that would let me know any strange and unusual sounds. When Nikhil tried to spray, my mobile vibrated and I realized that it was unusual. I waited to observe what he was upto. He dealt with the CCTV footage before he approached Harish to strangle him. Not so surprisingly, Nihil had no clue what he did when he was interrogated this morning.”

Chetan continued, “Be assured that this menace has come to an end. We are trying to find the person who was hypnotizing all these people. I will be with you for the remaining few weeks until we find the real perpetrator and nail him down.”

After a couple of days, they found that Chinnappa was alive. He was doing this all this while. After doing further research, it was found that Chinnappa had a history of homicides and he was arrested many times since his childhood. He escaped from jail many times and got new life with new name in new places.